Artist has been key force in punk rock history

SAN FRANCISCO - Winston Smith stands outside the DNA Lounge with a herd of tattooed and pierced punkers. With his trimmed gray beard, thick blackleather jacket and brown fedora angled rakishly, he looks more like a chaperone than a metal head waiting to get into a music club.

The artist who created some of punk rock's most recognizable symbols a few decades ago is about to see GWAR, a heavy metal band of former art students known for dressing in elaborate monster costumes and spraying gallons of fake blood into the crowd. At 53, Mr. Smith still gravitates to the loud, contentious music he helped popularize with his defiant album covers in punk's early years.

"You realize that an entire generation has passed you by, but it shows how enduring punk really is," Mr. Smith says later at a coffeehouse in the city's North Beach neighborhood.

Mr. Smith's lifelong contribution to punk was recently celebrated with the 20th anniversary of the custom twin fin surfboard. His art was reproduced on surfboards and toured clubs, including CBGB in New York. The boards were auctioned online and the proceeds donated to VH1's "Save the Music."

The artist is revered by fans, and invited backstage to visit bands such as Green Day; he designed the cover art for the group's 1995 album, Insomniac, a montage that features a man playing a violin while getting a chest X-ray, and a 1950s June Cleaver-like housewife playing a guitar.

While the Ramones created the angry three-chord sound of American punk, Mr. Smith is credited with crafting a lasting album-cover aesthetic - montage art blisteringly critical of the establishment. Most famously, he created the stylized logo of the Dead Kennedys, a San Francisco band that for many defined the in-your-face, politically liberal posture of 1980s American punk rock. The logo - with the "DK" letters pointed like spears - has appeared on club walls and notebooks around the world.

Mr. Smith's montage art is a dark hybrid of 1950s advertising and scathing social criticism that skewers capitalism, domesticity and sexism. These days, it's as likely to be hanging in places like the Varnish Gallery in San Francisco as it is to be stapled to a telephone pole.

His works include such pieces as Addicted to War, a montage in which the Statue of Liberty holds a hypodermic needle with the words "WAR" written on it while a shopping cart filled with tanks sits in the background.

Mr. Smith's art was even called dangerous by the Dead Kennedys' vocalist, Jello Biafra, in particular In God We Trust, Inc. Mr. Smith took an old crucifix with a removable Jesus, covered it with folded dollar bills and placed a bar code near the top to protest what he viewed as the commercialization of religion.

But the artist known best for his confrontational work is a quiet and gracious man who sets his watch 35 minutes ahead to offset his perennial tardiness. And he's still challenged by today's technology - he struggles to figure out a cell phone, which he reluctantly bought last year.

Mr. Smith has worked by kerosene lamps in a cabin on California's North Coast for decades, a fittingly remote location for an artist who painstakingly fashions his work by hand and who changed his birth name. His tools aren't computer programs but an X-Acto knife, musty magazines, old catalogs and glue, materials he uses to lampoon a world where "everyone is a suspect."

Signs of his punk past include a dog tag on his key chain that reads "Smash the State," and pins with the names of punk bands.